Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute will be presenting more than 70 studies at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago, May 29 – June 2, 2015.

Researchers report promising outcomes from a clinical trial with patients with a rare form of bone marrow failure who received a hematopoietic stem cell transplant after pre-treatment with immunosuppressive drugs only. This is the first trial reporting successful transplant in dyskeratosis congenita (DC) patients without the use of any radiation or conventional cytotoxic chemotherapy beforehand.

Terminal cancer patients who receive chemotherapy in the last months of their lives are less likely to die where they want and are more likely to undergo invasive medical procedures than those who do not receive chemotherapy.

A normal enzyme called SYK pairs with FLT3, the most commonly mutated enzyme found in acute myelogenous leukemia, to promote progression of the cancer and its resistance to treatment with FLT3-blocking drugs, which may explain relatively poor results in clinical studies. In a mouse model, treatment with a combination of drugs to inhibit the two enzymes was more effective than treatment with either drug alone.

In a nationwide study of women with triple-negative breast cancer, adding the chemotherapy drug carboplatin or the angiogenesis inhibitor Avastin to standard chemotherapy drugs brought a sharp increase in the number of patients whose tumors shrank away completely.

In a new study, women with relatively small, HER2-positive breast tumors who received a combination of lower-intensity chemotherapy and a targeted therapy following surgery or radiation therapy were very unlikely to have the cancer recur within a few years of treatment.

Children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of pediatric cancer, can safely receive intravenous infusions of a reformulated mainstay of chemotherapy that has been delivered via painful intramuscular injection for more than 40 years, research suggests.

A targeted drug that reduces blood flow to tumors prolonged the survival of patients with advanced stomach cancer after standard treatments failed, according to results of large multicenter clinical trial led by scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.